READING:
meat
had a very general meaning, more or less equivalent to food, in early medieval times. So did the equivalent French word, viande; the first French cookery book, Le Viandier, was not so named because of any emphasis on animal flesh. ‘White meats’, in medieval English, were dairy products such as milk and cheese. Gradually, however, the meaning of ‘meat’ became more restricted until, with the exception of a few terms and phrases such as ‘sweetmeat’ and ‘meat and drink’, it came to refer solely to the flesh of animals used as food.
Most often, the word applies to the skeletal muscle of mammals; it would not include OFFAL (although many ‘meat products’ may contain offal). Of the several dozen mammals used for food on a regular basis, those yielding BEEF, VEAL, PORK, and LAMB are dominant in the western world, while WATER-BUFFALO has importance in Asia and GOAT retains some importance in the numerous parts of the world where goats thrive.
THE NUTRITIONAL AND MORAL DEBATE
A piece of meat is central to the definition of a proper meal for most Europeans and N. Americans. And it is an important source of high-quality protein in their diet. It supplies many of the AMINO ACIDS required by the human body for good health. It is also a good source of iron (see MINERALS), vitamin A, and some B vitamins (see VITAMINS).
A less desirable component of the diet which is also supplied by meat is fat, especially saturated fatty acids (see FATS AND OILS), present in relatively high proportions in red meats. Neither cutting visible fat off the meat nor breeding very lean animals are entirely satisfactory responses, since the fat makes a valuable contribution to flavour and texture. The answer would seem to be to eat less meat generally.
The VEGETARIAN movement points out that there is no necessity for meat in human diet, as all the nutrients which it provides can be obtained from other sources. The arguments that killing for food is morally wrong and that raising food animals is a prodigal and wasteful way to use land are both frequently advanced; objections are also raised to modern methods of intensive animal husbandry. Yet people continue to eat meat; frequently in wealthy countries, and whenever they can in poorer ones. Meat on the plate is often an indication of status and wealth. Also, most people enjoy the taste and texture, so some meat substitutes, such as textured vegetable proteins (see PROTEIN), are textured and flavoured in ways which attempt to imitate meat (see also PROTEIN AND HUMAN HISTORY for the consequences of a higher-protein diet).
Meat, more than any other food, is hedged around with taboos and notions of uncleanliness. Meat-eating peoples display puzzling anomalies over which species they consider ‘clean’. There are no clear reasons why one animal should be perfectly acceptable food in one culture and not at all in another. Ancient ethnic and religious divisions, and the special hygiene problems provided by handling meat, have been suggested. The meat taboos best known to Europeans are the Jewish and Muslim prohibitions on pork and BLOOD, and the Hindu prohibition on beef. The British find the idea of eating HORSEMEAT distasteful, although it is used in much of continental Europe. Few Europeans would consider eating DOG except under the most extreme circumstances; yet dog meat is consumed in parts of China and was an important source of protein in ancient Mexico. Amphibians and reptiles, such as FROG, LIZARD, and SNAKE, are eaten in some areas. Animals which have a carnivorous diet are not generally considered suitable for food, and the meat of uncastrated adult male animals is often shunned. The strongest prohibition is that on CANNIBALISM, the consumption of human flesh.
The ‘moral debate’ referred to above has helped to precipitate lively discussions about the diet of early ancestors of humans, in an effort to establish what humans ‘naturally eat’. These discussions seem unlikely ever to be fully concluded. However, it can be said that early in human history the invention of stone weapons and the development of hunting skills allowed for more meat in the diet, and the discovery of how to make fire enabled meat to be cooked and thus rendered more palatable. At the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 BC), Europeans were hunting on a large scale and meat, at that time always in the form of GAME, was important in their diets.
The domestic animals familiar today were developed from wild ancestors in prehistoric times. The chronology is uncertain, but it is thought that sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were all undergoing domestication in the Middle East by 7000 BC. The dog was domesticated in both Eurasia and N. America, and the GUINEA PIG in S. America. The horse (thought to have been domesticated in Russia around 3000 BC) and the chicken (India, about 2000 BC) came late to the scene. All this was important for the history of meat-eating. It should be noted, however, that while domestication and herding meant that meat was close at hand and easily caught, it did not necessarily mean that it was eaten in large amounts, for animals were also valued for milk, wool, and draught.
Another important advance was the invention of fireproof metal and pottery containers, which made it possible for meat to be simmered in liquid as an alternative to roasting in front of the fire. A more ancient, but less convenient, method for cooking it in a liquid had been to place it in a stone-lined pit filled with water, and drop fire-heated stones in to warm the water; see FULACHTA FIADH, dealing with this in Ireland.
Cooking meat is touched on further at the end of this article. Meawhile it is appropriate to consider more closely just what is being cooked.
THE STRUCTURE OF MEAT AND ITS COLOUR
Physically, skeletal muscle consists of long bundles of very thin fibres, each fibre representing an individual cell. Collectively, these bundles give the ‘grain’ apparent when muscles are cut across. The basic chemistry of meat exploits the properties of two proteins which allow voluntary movement in animals. These are actin and myosin which exist as long molecules lying parallel to each other in muscle fibres. When muscles contract, electrical impulses cause the two proteins to slide past each other and bond, forming a complex molecule known as actomyosin, shortening and holding the position. The fibre bundles are supported by fine sheets of CONNECTIVE TISSUE and are attached to the bones by tendons; the protein COLLAGEN is important in these tissues. Protein accounts for about 18% of the total weight of lean raw muscle, water represents about 75%, and fat 3%. Most of the water is held mechanically within the structure of the muscle, although a small proportion is chemically bound to the protein. Proportions vary according to species, and joints of meat usually include more fat in the form of visible layers.
These properties contribute to the taste and feel of meat on the palate. Long, slender muscle fibres are associated with tenderness, and juiciness with the capacity of the muscle to hold water. High proportions of connective tissue increase the toughness of meat. Reticulin and elastin are not affected by heat, although collagen is, and on heating becomes GELATIN. Most meat produced by western animal husbandry also includes deposits of fat, both as a solid layer under the skin and around internal organs, and as marbling, tiny flecks within the muscle. Marbling also contributes to tenderness, as the pockets of fat melt and lubricate the muscle fibres during cooking.
The red colour of meat is derived from two pigments, both of which contain iron which combines reversibly with oxygen. Haemoglobin, the red pigment in blood responsible for oxygen transport, accounts for about one-quarter to one-third of the pigment. The rest is myoglobin which holds oxygen within the muscle, ready for metabolic purposes. The harder a muscle has to work, the more oxygen it requires and the more myoglobin it contains. HEART muscles, which work non-stop, are a deep red. Age and species also affect the amount of myoglobin; thus beef is a deeper red than veal, and lamb is redder than pork. WHALE meat, which has to hold large amounts of oxygen when the animals make prolonged dives, contains so much myoglobin that it is almost black.
Chemical changes in myoglobin produce the colour changes in fresh meat. After death, the pigment changes from the bright red oxygenated form in living tissue, oxymyoglobin, to purplish, deoxygenated myoglobin. If the meat is cut, the surface turns bright red again for a short time, as oxygen from the air combines with the myoglobin to give oxymyoglobin once more. Fresh meat sometimes shows a brownish discoloration due to denaturation of myoglobin to a form known as metmyoglobin. This reaction is also partially responsible for the brown colour of cooked meat. Traditional meat cures usually turn the meat a pink colour which is heat stable. A reaction between myoglobin and sodium or potassium NITRATES, present in minute quantities in many recipes for preserving meat, is responsible for this. Meat fat also varies in colour, a creamy white being considered most desirable.
The texture and flavour of beef benefits from hanging or ageing the carcass after slaughter. The lean part of beef which has not been aged for long is bright red. Beef which has been aged for some time is a darker red.
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE FLAVOUR AND TEXTURE OF MEAT BEFORE COOKING
The most obvious influence is that of species; other factors are the breed, age, nutrition, sex, and activity level of an animal. Domesticated animals, particularly cattle, have long been bred for specific purposes, and those intended for beef generally provide better meat than dairy cattle. Younger animals have tenderer muscle but less fat than older ones; this is why veal has a rather dry texture. Flavour, too, is milder. Castrated males have a different distribution of fat and muscle from uncastrated ones. A well-nourished animal is fatter, and one which has had little more to do than graze in a field will be tenderer than one that has spent its life pulling a plough. Exercise increases the number of filaments in the bundles of muscle fibres; the larger the bundle, the tougher the meat tends to be. Feedstuffs, too, make a difference to flavour, and certain substances may actually taint the meat.
The condition of the animal at slaughter and the treatment of the carcass afterwards are also important. Indeed, the physiological state of an animal at the time of slaughter is extremely important to the quality of the meat. A calm, well-rested animal is desirable, for in this state the muscles contain their full complement of glycogen (a form of carbohydrate found only in animal tissue, the substance which provides energy for instant action). On slaughter, the glycogen undergoes a series of chemical changes which eventually result in the formation of LACTIC ACID. In a live animal the acid is removed by the bloodstream, or broken down further. In a dead one, it accumulates and lowers the PH of the muscle from about 7 to about 5.5. The increased acidity enhances tenderness (because it aids denaturation of the proteins) and, by making the meat less hospitable to BACTERIA, allows it to keep better. If the animal is struggling or exhausted, the glycogen content of the muscles is lower, and the acid content of the meat correspondingly less, with bad, even disastrous, consequences for the quality of the meat. Rigor mortis, however, is a temporary and inevitable consequence of death, in which the actin and myosin bind in response to changes in the chemical conditions within the muscle; it passes within hours as the changes continue. If meat is cooked while it persists, it will be too tough.
Domestic animals killed for meat in Britain are first stunned and then bled; removing the blood decreases the risk of spoilage. Generally, after dressing (removal of the hide, head, feet, and internal organs), rigor is allowed to pass and the carcass is hung or aged by suspending it in a temperature of 1–3 °C (34–7 °F) under controlled humidity for a length of time which varies according to species. Lamb is aged for up to a week, pork for about 10 days, and beef can be aged for up to six weeks. Veal requires no ageing. For kosher meat (see JEWISH DIETARY LAWS), kashruth law stipulates that all meat must be consumed within 72 hours of slaughter. Offal is consumed very soon after slaughter.
During ageing further slow changes leading to increased tenderness occur in the meat. These are poorly understood, but are probably due to ENZYMES acting within the muscles. It is now unusual for meat to be aged for very long, principally for economic reasons: a large quantity of meat in store represents a considerable amount of inert capital; the storage itself is expensive; the meat loses some weight due to evaporation; and the surface of the carcass has to be trimmed after hanging, representing further loss.
An independent limiting factor in ageing meat is the fatty acid content. Unsaturated fatty acids are prone to rancidity. Beef, however, has a high saturated fatty acid content, which means it can be hung for a long time.
JOINTING MEAT
Patterns of jointing meat vary between countries depending on the methods favoured for cookery. In England, meat tends to be cut with two main methods in mind: roasting, for the tenderer parts with a high proportion of muscle, and stewing, for areas with more connective tissue. The various roasting joints are cut across bones and groups of muscles, and the fat left in place. Areas such as the forequarter, less suited to this treatment, are cut into chunks for stewing. N. Americans follow a simplified version of the same principle, with more emphasis on yielding small pieces such as STEAKS and CHOPS suitable for grilling (broiling) or barbecuing; meat unsuitable for such methods is often minced (ground). French butchery methods rely more on dissecting out muscles. Freed from bone, fat, and connective tissue, the meat is rolled and tied to give neat compact joints suitable for cooking with wine or stock.
At this stage, the tenderness of meat can also be influenced by breaking it down physically. Chopping, mincing, or grinding, which breaks the fibres into small pieces, is a common response to tough meat, from the American HAMBURGER to the Middle Eastern KIBBEH. Some cheaper cuts of steak are beaten or tenderized mechanically, but this also affects the water-holding capacity of the muscle, to the detriment of juiciness in the cooked meat. Even tender meat is cut in slices across the grain, making it easier to chew, as the fibres are shorter. Most cuisines have examples of this, for instance, the American T-bone steak, the French escalope (see VEAL), the Middle Eastern KEBAB, and the thin slices cut for STIR-FRYING in Chinese cookery.
The cook may also influence tenderness and flavour in the kitchen. One way of doing this is to add fat by LARDING or barding (as when small birds are wrapped in thin sheets of fat). Another is using a MARINADE. For marinating, meat is soaked in mixtures of herbs, spices, oil, and acid ingredients such as wine, vinegar, or fruit juice. Acid does denature the surface proteins of the meat, but has a limited effect on the interior and tends to make the meat dry. Chemical TENDERIZERS, using enzymes which break down proteins, can also be rubbed over meat before cooking.
COOKING MEAT
Meat is rarely consumed raw, although some cultures include the practice and one or two western dishes, notably steak TARTARE and carpaccio, do call for raw meat. There are several good reasons for cooking meat. Safety is one; raw meat may carry pathogenic organisms.
Cooking also enhances flavour and makes meat easier to chew and digest. It affects the structure of meat in several ways. It acts on the muscle fibres, in which the proteins coagulate, becoming shrunk and dense under prolonged heating. Collagen dissolves slowly at a low temperature, faster at a higher one. SEARING or surface browning enhances flavour (but does not form a juice-retaining crust, as was thought in the 19th century). Cooking denatures the myoglobin; it retains its red oxymyoglobin form in rare meat, but oxidizes and turns greyish-brown on further heating.
Methods for cooking meat fall into two basic categories: dry, which means to ROAST, GRILL, or FRY; and wet—to BRAISE, STEAM, POACH, or BOIL. Dry methods, in which heat reaches the meat by convection through the air or conduction through the surface of a pan, are generally used for tender cuts; wet methods, which rely on liquids for heat transfer, are suitable for tougher cuts with more connective tissue. Of late, there has been an interest in cooking meats at lower temperatures, and for longer, than was once thought feasible. One method, the confit, has found general favour, but roasting or baking at very low temperatures for a matter of hours has been seen to result in very tender meat with excellent flavour. The method of cooking, and how much cooking, will often depend on how the meat is to be eaten: those cultures which do not employ sharp metal implements at table will be aiming for a very different effect from those which do.
For more information on meat cookery, see BEEF; LAMB; PORK; VEAL; and BARBECUE.
See also MEAT PRESERVATION.
meatballs
have been the subject of an eccentric and enthralling book by Spoerri (1982), but neither he, nor any other author, has succeeded or could succeed in treating the subject comprehensively. There are too many manifestations, around the world, of this item, which is essentially just minced meat (of any edible animal) formed into a ball and cooked in any of various ways. For some of the best versions, in S. Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, and N. Africa, see KOFTA.
Some of the general names in other languages for meatball are: albóndiga (Spanish); keftédes (Greek); kötbulle (Swedish); Klopse (German); frikadeller (Danish). There is great diversity among these, for the other ingredients and flavourings vary considerably. In Greece, for example, meatballs may include flat-leaved parsley, Greek oregano, thyme, mustard seeds, wine, breadcrumbs, olive oil, and salt and pepper. The result is unmistakably Greek and could not conceivably be confused with a meatball from one of the Nordic countries. Traditional sauces or accompaniments also serve as lines of demarcation. Dill sauce or sour cream and spring onion sauce would label meatballs Russian, as Lesley Chamberlain (1983) indicates in an interesting passage about the oval kotlety and round bitki of that country. (She also implies what are patently insoluble riddles about the points at which meatballs become meat patties or HAMBURGERS or RISSOLES as their shape diverges from the purely spherical. Such questions abound. May one call a torpedo-shaped KIBBEH a meatball?)
Meatballs may be small, designed to go into soups or to be part of a dressing for pasta, or large enough to be the main element of a savoury dish. In the latter case they would often be a humble, inexpensive dish, ordering which in a restaurant would not have impressed American waiters of the mid-20th century, if one may be guided by the song about the man who ordered a single meatball and hankered for some bread to go with it, but was embarrassed to hear the waiter’s voice come echoing down the hall: ‘We don’t serve bread with one meat ball.’
meat extracts
is a term covering various products which claim to contain all the ‘goodness’ and flavour of meat in concentrated form. They are called extracts, or, more properly, ‘extractives’, because they are soluble substances extracted from meat when it is put into water. Chemically, they include soluble inorganic salts, lactic acid, and various nitrogenous compounds which are not proteins. Manufacturers add flavourings and other ingredients according to their own formulae. Best known in Britain are Bovril (a thick, syrupy dark brown substance), and Oxo (the crumbly ‘stock cube’); both were originally intended for dilution as drinks. Their role as a dietary supplement is less than early advertising implied, but they contain B-group vitamins, and stimulate the secretion of saliva and gastric juices, a property derived from the smell and flavour of compounds produced during cooking meat. They are still used for drinks, as flavouring agents, and are added to meat dishes, soups, and numerous savoury snacks.
Commercial meat extracts have a complex history. When, in the late 18th century, scientists began to study the composition of meat, they claimed to have discovered a substance, held to be responsible for the good flavour of meat-based soups and sauces and the brown crusts of roasts, which they called ‘osmazome’ (from Greek, osme = odour, and zomos = soup). Through popularizing works by scientists and gastronomers in the first half of the 19th century, its retention came to be considered a very important part of meat cookery. (Later, it became apparent that osmazome was a complex mixture of chemicals produced by browning reactions when meat juices were concentrated over heat.)
Nutritional theory also contributed to the development of meat extracts. The French physiologist Magendie, in the early 19th century, discovered that foods containing nitrogen are essential to human growth. This attracted much attention. Osmazome was known to be rich in nitrogen, and the German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig, experimenting with the broth from boiled meat, noted that this too contained appreciable amounts of the element. In the 1840s, he undertook experiments to discover how nitrogen contributed ‘flesh-forming’ properties. He concluded that some nitrogen-containing foods were more valuable than others. These experiments laid the basis for future work on PROTEIN.
This work led to speculation that water in which meat had been steeped or cooked yielded a soluble substance of great value as food. Meat bouillon was already a traditional medicine; the scientific discoveries enhanced this and led to a vogue, now disproved but not forgotten in folklore, for jellied broth and beef tea (made by infusing scraped raw beef in hot water for some hours) as invalid food. These substances were popularly considered to be strengthening, palatable, easily digested, and stimulating to the appetite.
A domestic precedent for preserving bouillons was provided by PORTABLE SOUP, strong meat broth boiled until it became syrupy, at which stage it was allowed to set and dry out. This had been available since at least the early 18th century.
Liebig eventually took the view that GELATIN, nitrogenous compounds in broth, and ‘osmazome’ were not flesh formers. This conclusion did not prevent him from entering commerce with a product for which extravagant nutritional claims were made. In the 1850s he had described a process for manufacturing a meat extract, and decided there was a market for such a product, based on a glut of meat available in southern hemisphere countries. In 1865 Liebig’s ‘Extractum Carnis’ reached Britain from Fray Bentos in Uruguay. Later this was renamed ‘Lemco’, and was finally reformulated to become Oxo (first marketed in 1900).
Bovril originated in the 1870s when Scottish butcher and entrepreneur John Lawson Johnston emigrated to Canada and became involved in food processing. One of his inventions was ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’, first manufactured in Quebec in 1874, and promoted with free samples at ice carnivals in Montreal. Re-established in London, Johnson began to manufacture a stronger product marketed under the brand name Bovril (from Latin, bo = ox; and vril, from vrilya = life force, a word coined in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton).
Inspired advertising implying that a small amount of meat extract contained the concentrated equivalent of much larger weights of meat, and a belief in the essential ‘goodness’ of this, ensured success for the products. Especially notable was a picture of an ox sadly regarding a pot of Bovril, captioned ‘Alas! my poor brother’. Such claims, including that by Liebig’s company, that a pound of extract contained the concentrated essence of 36 lb (16 kg) of meat, were rubbished by doctors and others. Law’s Grocer’s Manual (c.1895) remarked that ‘Most of these preparations form pleasant stimulants, but of very doubtful nutritiveness’, a statement which did not prevent a mass of imitations, including Borthwicks Fluid Beef, Hipi Mutton Essence, Bonovin’s Exox, CWS Silvox, Foster Clark’s Ju-Vis, Viskor, Verox, Beefex, Vimbos, Vigoral, Hugon’s Torox, and Valentine’s Meat Juice. Bovril and Oxo survived, Liebig merging with Brooke Bond in 1968 to form the multinational Brooke Bond Oxo.
The manufacture of meat extracts and essences is a trade secret, but seems likely to follow Liebig’s original principles of steeping raw, pulped beef in water, heating the mixture, then straining it under pressure, boiling, and evaporating the liquid to a pasty consistency. Current brands have hydrolized vegetable protein and other ingredients included in the lists on their labels.
Laura Mason
meat loaf
a dish whose visibility is considerably higher in real life, especially in N. America and Britain, than in cookery books. This situation might be changed if it had a French name (pâté chaud de viande hachée, préalablement marinée dans du vin de pays et des aromatiques), but it does not. In the USA the term was only recorded in print from 1899, in Britain not until 1939 (although liver loaf and ham loaf occurred earlier). The use of ‘loaf’ is particularly appropriate as most recipes include bread, usually in the form of soft breadcrumbs. Also, it is shaped like a loaf and may indeed be baked in a loaf tin or something similar. A worthy dish, which can embody the sort of rusticity which the word ‘peasant’ evokes, but can also exhibit the kind of refinement associated with bourgeoise cookery. Its range, however, does not extend into the realm of HAUTE CUISINE.
The editors of the OED assert that meat loaf is usually eaten cold in slices.
meat preservation
is one ancient and important part of the art of food PRESERVATION in general, a topic also discussed under CANNING, DRYING, FREEZING, PICKLE, REFRIGERATION, SALTING, SEALING, and SMOKING FOODS.
Raw meat putrefies because it is an ideal food for micro-organisms. BACTERIA and MOULD spores are easily introduced during processing, and they metabolize the surface of the meat, discolouring it and producing breakdown products with a foul smell. Storage processes are designed to inhibit this. Several methods are employed. They depend on controlling temperature, excluding oxygen, salting, and dehydration.
Dehydration is probably the most primitive method. At the simplest level, hanging thin strips of meat in a dry, draughty atmosphere is sufficient; this is how JERKY is made. Smoking meat probably originated from efforts to dry meat over the fire; smoke contains chemicals which have a preservative effect (see, for example, the reestit mutton of ORKNEY AND SHETLAND). At the far extreme of technology, meat is dehydrated by freeze-drying to provide lightweight military rations. Drying radically alters the texture of the meat, making it hard and chewy.
Until the mid-19th century, by far the most important preservation method was salting. This method was known in Britain as long as 2,000 years ago, and some types of salted meat, notably those based on pork, are still popular today. Salt acts as a preservative by dissolving in water in the muscle, thus producing a highly saline solution in which few bacteria can survive. Over the centuries several different methods or cures for meat have developed. One principal difference is whether the meat is dry salted or soaked in brine. Spices and sugar are sometimes added to give extra flavour, but the most important addition is saltpetre or NITRATE, which, in tiny quantities, helps the salt to penetrate the meat and produces a stable pink colour.
Microbial growth in meat can also be prevented by SEALING, excluding oxygen. This principle was known, but imperfectly understood, by the Romans, who preserved meat by placing it in containers and covering it completely with honey. It is also the principle underlying English POTTING and the French method of making CONFIT of GOOSE or DUCK, in which the meat is cooked and stored in copious amounts of melted fat.
One problem with these relatively primitive methods is obtaining a truly airtight seal. This was solved in the early 19th century. In France, Nicolas APPERT was awarded a prize for his method of sealing jars in 1804. In England in 1810, a method for sealing meat in iron canisters was patented by Robert Durand. Meat and fat was placed in an airtight tin box, the top soldered on, and the whole container then heated to sterilize the contents. The art of CANNING developed rapidly in N. America, and by the latter part of the century, large amounts of canned meat were being imported to Britain from the USA, Australia, and Argentina. The basic method for canning remains the same today, with refinements in the shapes of the cans, the materials used, and a finer judgement of the time and temperature involved.
From the late 19th century onwards, meat-preservation techniques have concentrated on controlling low temperatures. Bacteria do not grow at temperatures below freezing (although they are not killed). It was common knowledge that meat kept well when very cold or frozen, but few people were able to exploit this. Ice houses, insulated pits filled with ice cut from frozen rivers and ponds in the winter, were only for the rich. It was the invention of mechanical refrigeration during the mid-19th century and its installation in steamships that made the difference. The first cargo of frozen beef from Australia arrived in London in 1880, and after that became a regular import. Frozen meat is kept at a temperature of −18 °C (0 °F). It is preferable for meat to be frozen quickly, as this forms small ice crystals. If large crystals are allowed to form, they damage the structure of the meat physically, and on thawing some of the water is lost in the form of ‘drip’, the thin red fluid which defrosting meat releases. Chilling, too, in which the meat is held at temperatures between 1 and 4 °C (34–9 °F), can also be regarded as a short-term method of meat preservation at low temperature.
Other methods of meat preservation, products of 20th-century technology, are still largely at the experimental stage. IRRADIATION, treatment with ionizing radiation at doses which kill spoilage organisms, has encountered problems with consumer acceptability, and produces flavour changes within the meat. The economic and social importance of meat in the diet of the developed world means that work on new methods of preservation is likely to continue.
medieval cuisine
a phrase usually referring to western, or Christian, Europe and to the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. There is good reason for this; almost all we know of medieval cuisine has been derived from written sources, and the oldest surviving culinary manuscript from Christian Europe was most likely composed in the first half of the 13th century.
The noticeable evolution of cuisine over these three centuries suggests that a developed, if undocumented, cuisine must have already existed before the first written recipe. It was certainly not a direct continuation of Roman cuisine (see CLASSICAL ROME), nor even of the later BYZANTINE COOKERY, both of which showed a fondness for the highly flavoured fish sauce GARUM (or garos). More likely, the origins of medieval European cuisine were in the simple roasts and one-pot stews of meats and vegetables which became progressively more sophisticated as they were infused with spices and accompanied by elaborate sauces. For the culinary development of the post-1000 period must be seen in the context of the growth of towns and the increase in trade which occurred, especially after the First Crusade of 1099.
The twin revival of trade and towns had two corollaries particularly relevant to the development of cuisine: a gradual shift from self-sufficiency to a money-based economy, and the rise of the urban bourgeois. People were no longer solely dependent on what their patch of land produced but could buy what the market offered—and as trade expanded, so the market offered an increasing diversity of goods. But trade also brought contact with other civilizations, in particular the Arabs who controlled the spice trade from the East. In the 11th century the Genoese had trading enclaves in S. Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, and the guild of spice merchants of Montpellier had branches in N. Africa in the 13th century. Sicily, which was such an important centre for the diffusion of knowledge through translation of works from Arabic to Latin, was an Arab colony from the 9th to the 11th century. What the Arab civilization offered was a general model of a refined lifestyle in which food had a respected place, and specific examples of the use of ingredients which had hitherto been unknown (such as SUGAR) or little used in cuisine (such as ALMONDS).
Incidentally, the Arab link also provided a theoretical foundation, in the form of medicinal and dietetic writings, for the later European culinary texts. Around the 11th century Latin translations of many of the most important works of medicine—usually commentaries on the Hippocratic corpus by such respected doctors as Rhazes and AVICENNA—began to reach Europe. Alongside these, and similarly derived from Arab sources, was a popular and practical genre of ‘health handbooks’ which typically set out a code of healthy living, including dietary recommendations; while they did not necessarily give detailed recipes, they often described how an ingredient should be prepared, or which ingredients went well together. Certain medieval recipes (e.g. for romania, discussed by Rodinson in Perry, ed, 2000) have been shown to have made their way from dietetic texts to culinary compilations. Further, the dietetic text provided the model for the early written recipes, typically succinct and summary. By the end of the 15th century the art of recipe-writing had progressed as much as had the art of cooking; no longer a sequence of telegraphic instructions, the written recipe became the expression of individual (and identified) master chefs who recorded systematically and in comprehensive detail their own practices and experiences.
The authors or compilers of the medieval culinary manuscripts, in so far as they are known, worked for kings, other nobles, and wealthy merchants. Indeed, many of the surviving manuscripts—over 130, scattered amongst libraries in Europe and America—began their lives in the libraries of the rich, though cookery books were not common in medieval libraries; inventories record herbals, books on medicine, dietetics, and agriculture, and books relating to the accepted leisure activities of the well-born rich (hunting, chess and other games, music), but mentions of cookery books are infrequent. Nevertheless, most of the texts were written in the vernacular, which suggests that they were intended for practical reference and instruction. And while they might have originated in noble and wealthy households, they included recipes for simple dishes as well as complex, costly ones.
Rich people, of course, could choose whether to eat simply or elaborately. The author of Le Menagier de Paris (1393) gives recipes for ‘Potages communs sans espices et non lyans’ (‘ordinary dishes without spices and unthickened’) which are typically soups or purées based on dried peas, fresh and dried broad beans, beet leaves, onions, and cabbage, sometimes with the addition of a piece of salted pork. Few of these ‘ordinary’ dishes, however, feature in his suggested menus for dinners to which guests would be invited, except those proposed for Lent. On the other hand, vegetable dishes formed the daily fare of resident students at the College of Trets in S. France in the mid-14th century, and for about six months of the year it was cabbage soup every second day! For the poor, whether living in the city or in the country, there was no alternative to these one-pot meals based on vegetables or pulses; they could not afford fresh meat, except perhaps on Sundays, and what they could afford were the cheaper meats and cuts which needed to be boiled to be made palatable. In any case, even had they been able to afford a joint for roasting, they lacked the necessary equipment. Studies of household inventories in France have shown that only rich households possessed roasting spits and grills; ordinary households had just a cauldron for boiling.
This soup or gruel, accompanied by bread, was the sustenance of the poor all over Europe, with minor variations from region to region. Dried peas and broad beans were commonplace in N. Europe, while in Mediterranean regions chickpeas and lentils augmented the options. Cabbages, beets, spinach, turnips, onions, leeks, and garlic were similarly prevalent, but southern gardens (at least by the 15th century) also yielded gourds, melons, aubergines, and cucumbers. It is significant that some of these ‘newer’ vegetables, introduced or popularized by the Arab culture, were prepared in more flattering ways than simply boiling with a piece of salt pork; they were puréed, enriched with eggs, flavoured with spices, in dishes which probably reflected an Arab influence. This variety of vegetables characterized the Mediterranean diet as much as did the predominance of white wheaten bread, the use of olive oil, eggs and fish when possible, an abundance of wine, and meat typically in the form of mutton, lamb, and kid; pork tended to be eaten in salted form. In N. Europe, by contrast, bread was made not only from wheat but also from rye and barley; dairy foods were more common, beef was preferred to mutton, and fresh pork was more frequently eaten. Techniques of salting and curing pork differed between N. and S. Europe; these different traditions are still evident today in York-style cooked hams and the dried prosciutto-style hams common to Italy, S. France, and Spain. Salads were rare in N. Europe, but relatively common in Mediterranean regions, especially in spring and summer; they were made of a diversity of young salad greens and herbs, dressed with oil, salt, and vinegar.
Social differentiation added another dimension to this depiction of medieval food and eating. For those workers paid wholly or partly in kind, the quantities offered of bread and of ‘companage’ (literally, ‘with bread’, typically the meat component of the ration) varied in accord with the status of the work. As one moved up the scale from labourer to brother to preceptor in a monastery or similar establishment, so did the quantity and quality of the companage, and so did the quantity or the quality of the wine. In royal households where a whole retinue of courtiers was employed, more and more varied dishes in total, and dishes of higher status, were offered to those of higher rank and standing in the household. Medieval dietaries explicitly listed those foods appropriate to labourers (cow meat, salted meats), and those more suitable to persons who practised a more leisured lifestyle (chicken and other poultry, lamb, veal). The medieval recipe collections reflect the foods of this latter category.
Not surprisingly, this hierarchical cuisine made much use of social markers, and spices were ideally suited to this purpose. Expensive and instantly recognizable, they marked the status of a dish and of the household in which it was offered. Simple, homely vegetable dishes tended to avoid spices, apart from pepper (which by the medieval period had become quite cheap), while sophisticated meat dishes used imaginative combinations of the different spices then available: pepper, long pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron, mace, cardamom, cloves, grain of paradise, galangal, cubeb. Certainly, spices added flavour interest to a dish, but their fascination resided primarily in their symbolic value. There is no evidence that spices were used to camouflage the undesirable flavours of stale—not to say rotten—meat in refrigerator-less days, nor that spices served to enliven a monotonous diet of salted meats and fish. The standard accompaniment to salted beef or pork was either mustard or a similar condiment made from the seeds of the rocket plant, Eruca sativa. Salted meats and fish were considered low-status ingredients, appropriate for labourers but not for nobles, and certainly not worthy enough to be treated with spices. Nor were spices used as preservatives; the common methods of preserving food then, as now, were salting, pickling (with vinegar), conserving with sugar or honey, and drying, and all these are described in medieval recipes. Spices may often have been added in the preserving process—especially with fruits and vegetables cooked with sugar or honey—but they were not, per se, the preserving agents.
The evidence of cookbooks shows that spices were a distinguishing mark of medieval cuisine on more than one level, differentiating rich from poor, town from country, special feasts from ordinary meals. Spices marked the religious festivals of Christmas and Easter, an association which is retained to the present day. Christmas was a busy period for the spice merchants; the thirteenth-century Provençal poem of Flamenca evokes an image of spices
giving such sweet and fragrant smell,
As at Montpellier, where they sell
And pound the spice at Christmas tide.
’Tis then that their best trade is plied
In spices.
Spices were not necessarily a standard ingredient in every dish, and could hardly have retained their image of luxury and rarity if they were ingredients of everyday usage. However, in those dishes which did call for spices, they would have been used in such amounts as to make their presence unmistakable.
One important role of spices was in sauces which were the obligatory accompaniment to roast meats (and, to a lesser extent, to boiled meats). Medicinal beliefs favoured such practices; since most meats were classified as cold and and moist, and spices as hot and dry, a spicy sauce helped to balance the dish. While certain sauces were specific to certain roasts, others could partner a variety of meats. Cameline sauce, in which the dominant spice was cinnamon, could be served with roast lamb, veal, kid, sucking pig, venison, chicken, pheasant, partridge, and rabbit; GREENSAUCE (salsa verde), typically a purée of herbs and garlic with the addition of ground nuts or breadcrumbs, went with mutton, kid, and lamb; a simple blend of lemon or orange juice, salt, and spices with roast partridge and pigeon. The dark and heavily spiced poivrade or piperata sauce was a standard accompaniment to game.
Similar sauces entered into the composition of brouets (to use the French term; bruet or browet in England), the ancestors of the later RAGOUTS. The medieval brouet was a dish of meat (or poultry, or fish) in a spiced and thickened sauce. It usually required three culinary operations, the most common sequence being parboil-fry-simmer in a sauce. Brouets were dishes of high status, their complexity no doubt appreciated by discriminating diners. The ingredients employed to thicken the sauce (and similarly, sauces for roasts), singly or in combination, varied from simply dried or toasted bread, often soaked in vinegar, wine, or VERJUICE then pounded with the spices, to almonds or almond milk, hazelnuts and walnuts, ground meat or fish, ground liver, and eggs or egg yolks, cooked or raw. In some sauces, particularly those made with almonds or almond milk, the sourness of the vinegar or verjuice was tempered by the addition of sugar or other sweet ingredients such as honey or, in Mediterranean regions, concentrated grape must (sapa in Italian manuscripts, arrop in Catalan ones).
In medieval Europe Christianity imposed an obligation to refrain from eating meat and other animal products such as milk and eggs during Lent, Ember Days, and on Fridays and Saturdays; in total, for about 150 days of the year meat was proscribed. Thus many of the meat dishes, in particular brouets, have Lenten or fish-day counterparts in which the meat is replaced by fish, stock by almond milk or a vegetable stock (the liquid from boiling peas, for example), lard by oil. Nevertheless, there were other ways of preparing fish which did not borrow from the carnal repertoire. They could be fried, for example—and often were in Mediterranean regions, where frying in olive oil was the most common procedure with small and medium-sized fish. Fried fish was accompanied by the juice of bitter oranges or lemons or by greensauce. Grilled fish was also served with lemon or orange juice, or with verjuice, or with the oil-and-vinegar marinade with which it was basted during cooking. Larger fish could be roasted (grilled), poached, or cooked in a sauce; such sauces, unless they were fish-day equivalents of meat dishes, tended to rely less on spices and more on herbs for flavouring.
Meat and fish could also be baked in pies. Some pies, consisting of whole chickens or joints of meat wrapped in a thick and presumably inedible pastry, were a means of short-term preservation; Maestro Martino (see ITALIAN COOKERY BOOKS) suggests that such pies keep for fifteen days, or as long as a month. Recipe books rarely give recipes or instructions for making pastry (merely ‘make a crust’), but by the end of the 15th century progress in culinary techniques produced a primitive type of edible shortcrust pastry using flour, olive oil, and water, or flour, eggs, and butter. Since this required only a short cooking time, pie fillings were also modified by being sliced or chopped and partly cooked. The torte, which probably originated in Italy and became very popular in N. Europe in the 16th century (as a tourte), was generally a double-crusted pie with a soft filling based on fresh cheese and eggs with herbs, mashed vegetables, or meat hashes; unexpectedly perhaps, it was liberally strewn with sugar and sprinkled with rosewater. There were also single-crusted tarts with similar fillings and tarts of apples and other fruits.
The logic of medieval menus was not such as to discriminate separate savoury from sweet dishes, which could appear in almost any service. Nevertheless, the final course, prior to the spiced wine and COMFITS, most often consisted of sweet dishes—fruit tarts, custard tarts, baked apples, WAFFLES (gaufres), and FRITTERS. Fritters were perhaps more customary in S. Europe, where oil was more plentiful (though many recipes imply that the fritters are a winter dish, to be made when the pig is killed so that they may fry in the rendered fat). Some consisted of soft fillings, similar to those for torte, wrapped in pastry and fried; others were made of fresh cheese blended with egg white, flour, and flavourings. Commonly, they were sprinkled with sugar or drizzled with honey (even batter-dipped slices of mild cheese received this treatment in Catalan cuisine).
In the popular perception medieval cuisine is light years away from today’s post-NOUVELLE CUISINE. Like an Egyptian mummy, it is seen as having curiosity value but little relevance to the present. Yet many dishes said to be ‘traditional’ have their origins in medieval cuisine, and many others have persisted, almost unchanged, for hundreds of years (a good example of this is the dish of spinach with currants or raisins and pinenuts found around the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to Genoa, which is very similar to one described in a 15th-century Catalan recipe). The Christmas MINCE PIES and the sweet, spiced petits pâtés de Pézenas both have medieval origins; the German Pfeffernüsse and the pan pepato from Bologna use spice combinations that could have come straight out of a medieval cookbook. The greensauce served with boiled beef in Italy is virtually no different to the salsa verde of medieval texts; the Catalan romesco can be described as a medieval sauce of pounded garlic, almonds, and bread, with the addition of pounded red peppers. A lemon wedge is a standard accompaniment to fried sole, and icing sugar is sprinkled on apple fritters, exactly as in the 14th and 15th centuries.
It might be rash to claim that modern cuisine is a direct descendant of the medieval, but it would be equally foolish to ignore the role of medieval cuisine in the evolution of European cuisines.
Barbara Santich
READING:
medieval cuisine: the sources
Scholarship in this field made great advances in the last decades of the 20th century. The known sources are now more numerous and variegated than they used to be; and much new work has been done on elucidating and comparing them. For some notable examples, see Flandrin and Mary and Philip Hyman (1983), Rudolph Grewe (1979), Constance Hieatt (1988), Carole Lambert (1992); Bruno Laurioux (1997), Barbara Santich (1995a), Terence Scully (1988, 1995).
‘Medieval’ is here taken as referring to Europe, and to mean the period from the 13th to the 15th centuries, for reasons explained in MEDIEVAL CUISINE.
The oldest surviving culinary manuscript from Christian Europe was most likely composed in the first half of the 13th century. It is written in old Danish, and forms part of a family of four related manuscripts (Grewe and Hieatt, 2001). Its content is such that it may well have originated in what is now Provence.
Following this and preceding the era of printed cookbooks are something like 150 other surviving manuscripts in various languages. Many of them can be grouped into ‘families’, where it is clear that some early compilation of recipes (which may itself not survive) was the ancestor of numerous later versions which display different degrees of adaptation or expansion (and different copying errors, which serve as clues for scholars trying to construct a ‘family tree’). Among those of special interest are:
medlar
Mespilus germanica, a small tree of the rose family and a cousin of the APPLE. It bears an apple-like fruit, but this is open at the bottom end, exposing the five seed boxes.
The medlar, native to Persia, was grown by the ancient Greeks, then by the Romans from the 2nd century BC. It was a useful addition to the then scanty range of late-ripening winter fruits, and it subsequently spread throughout Europe. It is hardy and flourishes even in Scandinavia.
Several varieties have been cultivated including a seedless one, but it is more common as a wild tree. The medlar can be grafted onto quince or pear stock, but does best on hawthorn stock, as Gerard (1633) noted:
The medlar-tree oftentimes grows in hedges among briars and brambles: being grafted on a white-thorn, it prospers and produces fruit three times as large as those which are not grafted at all, and almost the size of small apples. We have divers sorts of them in our orchard.
Among these sorts were the ‘Neapolitan’ variety and a dwarf medlar from the Alps and the hills of Narbonne and Verona.
Phillips (1823) commented that in his time the Dutch medlar was the only one in demand for planting.
The fruit has a notable peculiarity. Even when fully ripe in autumn, it is hard, green, astringent, and inedible. It is picked at this stage and stored in moist bran or sawdust until it browns and softens, a process called ‘bletting’. Internal fermentation gives the fruit an acid, aromatic taste which appeals to some and not to others. The result moved the poet D. H. Lawrence to refer to them as ‘Wineskins of brown morbidity, autumnal excrementa’, giving off an ‘exquisite odour of leave taking’.
The strange taste of the medlar was popular in Victorian Britain. The fruits were brought to table in their bran or sawdust in a dish, and, for a dessert, the brown pulp was scraped out and mixed with sugar and cream. They could also be briefly stewed with sugar. Medlar jelly was made. But a better conserve, acceptable even to those who disliked medlars, was medlar cheese, made with eggs and butter like the more familiar lemon curd.
Medlars have now fallen from favour, except in a few areas such as Piedmont where they are known by the dialect name puciu. In the USA they are virtually unknown.
The name ‘Naples medlar’ has been used for the AZAROLE.
‘Japanese medlar’ is another name for the LOQUAT. (The Japanese name is biwa.)
megapode
a general name applied to birds in the family Megapodiidae, which belong to Australasia, New Guinea, and various islands of the S. Pacific. These are remarkable in that they do not hatch their young, but after laying the eggs pile up over them mounds of earth or vegetation which serve as incubators. Some megapodes hang around these ‘nests’ until hatching is complete, but normally the chicks are left to struggle out when they hatch and to fend for themselves, never seeing their parents.
Two groups within the family are formed by the scrub-fowl and the brush turkeys. In the former group Megapodius freycinet, the common scrub-hen, is best known. Of its many subspecies, M. f. nicobariensis, the Nicobar scrub-hen, has been accorded high praise, e.g. by one author in the 1930s, who declared it to be unsurpassed as a game bird, with white, sweet, juicy, fat flesh.
Brush turkeys, which do look something like turkeys, are mostly Australian. The species Alectura lathami is found in many parts of the continent.
megrim
Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis, a FLATFISH of the W. Mediterranean and E. Atlantic. It is fished from relatively deep waters and attains a maximum length of 60 cm (24″); so, although its market length is much less, it is a sizeable fish. It enjoys moderate esteem in Spain but is generally regarded as unexciting, tending to be dry, and best fried with plenty of fat. The phrase ‘to have the megrims’ has nothing at all to do with the fish, that word being a variation of migraine. The dictionaries profess ignorance of the derivation of the fish-name.
Alternative names for this fish are sail-fluke and whiff. The latter is a mystery, but the former is explained at length by, for example, Yarrell (1859), who states that in the Orkneys it is observed to use its tail fin as a sail to speed its progress across the surface of the sea. He quotes an interesting communication, dated 1849, from a correspondent in N. Ronaldshay:
In the winter and early spring a pair of Black-headed Gulls take possession of the Bay, drive away all interlopers, and may be seen at daybreak every morning beating from side to side, on the wing, and never both in one place, except in the act of crossing as they pass. The Sail-fluke skims the ridge of the wave towards the shore with its tail raised over its back, and when the wave recedes is left on the sand, into which it burrows so suddenly and completely, that though I have watched its approach, only once have I succeeded in finding its burrow. The Gull, however, has a surer eye, and casting like a hawk, pounces on the Fluke, from which by one stroke of his bill it extracts the liver. If not disturbed, the Gull no sooner gorges this luscious morsel, than it commences dragging the fish to some outlying rock, where he and his consort may discuss it at leisure. By robbing the Black-backs I have had the house supplied daily with this excellent fish, in weather during which no fishing-boat could put to sea. Close to the beach of South Bay a stone wall has been raised to shelter the crops from the sea-spray. Behind this we posted a smart lad, who kept his eye on the soaring Gulls. The moment one of the birds made its well-known swoop, the boy rushed to the sea-strand, shouting with all his might. He was usually in time to scare the Gull away and secure the Fluke, but in almost every case with the liver torn out. If the Gull by chance succeeded in carrying his prey off to the rock, he and his partners set up a triumphant cackling, as if deriding the disappointed lad.
Mehlspeisen
literally ‘foods made with flour’, is a C. European overarching category of foods, some savoury and many sweet, which has been well described by Lesley Chamberlain (1989):
What the Austrians call Mehlspeisen, and which are eaten throughout their old empire, are those savoury or sweet dishes of dumplings, yeast pies, noodles, pancakes and other mixtures of grain with milk, sugar, cream and curds, which constitute more than a pudding and less than a meal. These dishes are deep tureens of nursery memories. As they literally translate, ‘foods made with flour’ can be sweet, semi-sweet or savoury, with more or less sugar and/or salt, depending on availability, or nowadays on taste. New dishes have evolved in every direction from the basic conjunction of coarse flour/meal and water.
… The various doughs and pastes combine with vegetables or fruit or soft cheese, cream, butter, bacon, nuts, jam, poppy seed and honey.
melegueta pepper
the spice from a W. African plant, Aframomum melegueta. Where Spanish influence is at work, the spelling in English has sometimes been malagueta or malaguetta. The spice has also been known as grains of paradise or Guinea grains or pepper.
The plant itself is a tall, reedlike herb which bears red or orange fruits 5–10 cm (2–4″) long. Each contains 60–100 brownish seeds, which are aromatic and pungent and which constitute the spice.
Melegueta pepper was unknown to the classical world, but acquired popularity in Europe from the 13th century onwards. This interest, for a long time so strong that the part of W. Africa from which it was shipped was known as the Grain Coast, was already declining in the 18th century and is now slight. However, the seeds continue to be used as a spice and for medicinal purposes in W. Africa, and the pulp surrounding them in the fruits is chewed as a stimulant.
A. granum-paradisi, a related species which also grows in W. Africa, is not, despite its scientific name, regarded as the true grain of paradise. Both species have served as CARDAMOM substitutes.
melokhia
(or molokhia), Corchorus olitorius, a plant related to and named after the MALLOW (for which melokhia is the Arabic word). It is sometimes called Jew’s mallow. It belongs to the same genus as the jute plant and is grown worldwide as a source of fibre; but the use of the dark green leaves as a vegetable is also widespread, from W. and N. Africa and the Mediterranean islands through the Middle East to Malaysia, Australia, the Pacific islands, S. America, and the Caribbean.
It is in EGYPT that the leaves, which are not unlike sorrel, have the greatest culinary importance. They are made into a soup, also called melokhia, to which they impart a mucilaginous/glutinous quality. This is one of the national dishes of Egypt and has acquired a symbolic importance as the typical dish of the populace, in contrast to more expensive dishes prepared in wealthier households. It is traditionally eaten with rabbit (or chicken or other bird) as a treat.
Generally, the leaves are cooked and eaten like SPINACH. They can be dried and stored; these make a fair substitute for fresh ones, and can be found in Middle Eastern food shops.
A few other plants in the genus provide edible leaves, and one (C. trilocularis) is cultivated in parts of Africa for use as a pot-herb.
melon
Cucumis melo, a fruit whose history, varieties, and nomenclature perplex even experts. All forms of the species hybridize readily with each other, or indeed with other family members; the French have traditionally taken care to avoid ‘incestuous intercourse’ by keeping melons and cucumbers well apart.
The melons familiar in western countries are eaten as dessert. In the Orient cooking melons, eaten as vegetables, are equally familiar. These two broad categories are treated here together. Neither includes the WATERMELON, which belongs to a different genus.
HISTORY
The wild ancestors of C. melo seem to have been native to the region stretching from Egypt to Iran and NW India. This fits the belief of many people that the finest melons of all in modern times come from Afghanistan and Iran and adjacent areas.
There is little clear evidence of melons being eaten in ancient times. References from classical Greece and Rome are sparse and lack the enthusiasm which one would certainly have expected if they had really good melons on their tables.
After the fall of the Roman Empire the rising Arab civilizations began to cultivate melons. Ibn Al Awam (d. 1145), the agricultural writer of Andalusia, lists six kinds of melon (none, according to his editor, recognizable as a variety known now).
The first unmistakable reference by a European writer is by Albertus Magnus (13th century), who distinguished between the watermelon and the ‘pepo’, describing the latter in terms which fit the modern cantaloupe (as the term is used in Europe, not as it is used in the USA). Melons were introduced to England in the 16th century, but had to be grown under glass bells or in glasshouses or ‘steam-pits’. The same will have been true of most European countries except for those in the Mediterranean region.
Meanwhile the melon had reached China, where it began to develop into cooking varieties. And in 1493 it reached the New World, when Columbus took melon seeds to Haiti on his second voyage. The new fruit was adopted with great enthusiasm by the Indians of C. and S. America; and the diffusion of melons into parts of N. America followed, although it was not until the last two decades of the 19th century that commercial growing and varietal development began in earnest.
DESSERT MELONS
These fall into three main categories, but there are also hybrids of an intermediate kind.
Cantaloupe melons are named for the town of Cantalupo near Rome, where they are supposed to have been first grown in Europe. They are among the most fragrant and delicious of melons, typically small, round, with a rough surface fissured into segments. The French Charentais is very small, has a yellow skin and orange flesh. The Ogen, named for the Israeli kibbutz where it was developed, has a yellow skin with green stripes rather than fissures, and green flesh. Galia is a related variety. Sweetheart has bright scarlet flesh. Besides varieties with green or salmon-coloured flesh, there are several with creamy-white flesh.
However, the name Cantaloupe is often used in N. America for melons in the next category
Netted (or musk or nutmeg) melons vary greatly but have one feature in common: a light network pattern which overlies and stands out from the surface. This was indicated by the word reticulatus in the former botanical name C. melo reticulatus. The flesh is usually but not always orange. Size varies from small to quite large. The skin may be whitish, yellow, or green; and it may or may not be segmented.
In N. America these are the most important melons of commerce. The best-known types are known as ‘cantaloupe’ and Persian. The latter is globular in shape, may weigh 3 kg (6 to 7 lb) and has a distinctive aromatic flavour. It is thought to have been introduced to California by Armenians.
Winter melons are so called because they ripen slowly and are not ready until late autumn. If picked before fully ripe, they will ripen slowly in storage, a procedure which is only possible to a very limited extent with the other categories of melon. Winter melons are slightly elongated, like a rugby football, and their skins are finely ribbed. The melons of Cavaillon were thought to be the finest by Alexandre DUMAS, who traded a complete set of his books (well over 300 volumes) for a lifetime supply.
However, the best known of the winter melons is the Honeydew, which has a yellowish, relatively smooth, skin and pale green flesh. Casaba melons, named after a Turkish town and in the same group, usually differ from Honeydews in having a rough skin. They have green or green and yellow skins and pale yellow flesh. Some connoisseurs believe that the finest fruits in this group are the long oval ones, with white flesh, of the cultivar Jharbezeh Mashadi in Iran.
The difficulty of knowing in advance whether a melon will be good or not is notorious. A French writer quoted by Leclerc (1925) declared pessimistically that it was necessary to try 50 to be sure of finding one really good specimen. However, the ripeness of a melon may be gauged by pressing the end opposite the stem. If the melon is ripe, it will yield quite noticeably. Cantaloupes and netted melons do not ripen much after being picked, so should not be bought if they are definitely hard.
The common practice of chilling melons before eating them makes them more refreshing, but diminishes the flavour. A good melon should not need sugar. Some people add a sprinkling of pepper or ginger, or salt.
COOKING MELONS
These are grown in India, China, Japan, and SE Asia. They are not sweet and are used for cooking like other vegetable gourds. Oil may be pressed from the seeds. See also WAX GOURD.
The best known of the ‘cooking melons’ is the pale, elongated variety called pickling melon or Chekiang melon, which is grown from Thailand through SE China to Japan. As its name suggests, it is pickled as well as being eaten fresh. The most important melon of this kind grown in India is known as kakhi/kakri and used to be classified as C. melo var utilissima, the last word of which name is borne out by a passage cited by Watt (1889–96):
This appears to me to be by far the most useful species of [the genus]; when little more than half-grown, they are oblong, and a little downy; in this state they are pickled; when ripe they are about as large as an ostrich’s egg, smooth and yellow; when cut they have much the flavour of the melon, and will keep good for several months, if carefully gathered without being bruised, and hung up; they are also in this stage eaten raw, and much used in curries.
Melon seeds are a common snack food wherever melons are grown. They are also used in cookery for certain dishes, e.g. in C. and S. America and in China.
Menagier de Paris, Le
the title of a late 14th-century treatise which has survived in several copies, giving remarkable insights into the organization of a noble household of that time. Until recently, the identity of the author was unknown, but Nicole Crossley-Holland (1996), after some diligent detective work, has argued cogently that the author was a certain Guy de Montigny, a ‘knight’ in the service of the Duke of Berry, who had residences in both his native Champagne and in Paris.
De Montigny (supposing that it was indeed he) composed the book when he was in his fifties, for the benefit of his young bride (an orphan, who was at most 15 years old when married), for whom it was intended to be a full brief on manners and deportment, and also morals and attitudes to marriage, plus a great deal of practical advice on management of the estate and its gardens, on running the household, and on organizing the purchase and preparation of food. It is this last feature which has given the book a special fascination for food historians. There are many compilations of recipes from medieval times (see MEDIEVAL CUISINE: THE SOURCES), and much may be learned from them, but Guy de Montigny provides much more, with everything set in the context of a real, functioning household.
This work has another feature which makes it exceptionally interesting. Most medieval compilations of recipes contained a certain amount of ‘dead wood’, because the processes of compiling and copying led naturally to the retention of at least some obsolete material from earlier times. Guy de Montigny, in contrast, was patently selecting for his youthful bride precisely those recipes which he expected to be used in his own house in the immediate future. By looking at the nature of the dishes he explained—including several kinds of POTAGE; coloured STEWS (white, green, yellow); PANCAKES, FRITTERS, and RISSOLES; CRAYFISH, CUTTLEFISH, PLAICE, RAY, SALT COD, and two or three dozen other fish; PARTRIDGE, WILD BOAR, and other game—one can form a vivid impression of the meals served at his table.
The Menagier may be studied in its first printed edition (Pichon, 1846, and reprinted several times in the 1960s); in the part translation by Eileen Power under the title The Goodman of Paris (1928); and in the edition by Georgine Brereton and Janet Ferrier (1981).
merenda
(also merienda)
an Italian and a Spanish word with similar but not identical meanings.
La merenda is an important institution in Italy, thus described by Patience Gray (1986):
The Italian word mero stands for wine which has not been tampered with. But as such wine is bound to go to one’s head if not accompanied by something to eat, it is ritually accompanied by a merenda. La merenda cannot be confused with the modern snack. The snack is snatched, la merenda is shared. The word implies conviviality and if anything is to be seized it is time by the forelock, an event insinuated between laying off work and the return to the polished anonymity of that little prison of perfection which is every Italian’s home.
It comprises food in its simplest form—good bread and a plate of local mortadella or salame.
In Spain, the term merienda has a similar but somewhat wider meaning; not just (afternoon) snack, but also outdoor meal, picnic.
The Catalan term refrigeris (meaning refreshment) corresponds more narrowly to the Italian merenda. A standard Catalan refrigeris, echoed elsewhere, is pa amb tomàquet, ripe tomato crushed onto bread with sea salt and olive oil, with wine. An engaging and amusing book by Pomés about the theory and practice of this item, sustaining for so many people, was published in 1985.
Whatever the terminology, and whatever particular foods are favoured in one place or another, the pattern in the European countries bordering on the Mediterranean, from Turkey to Spain, is similar. A refreshment is taken in the fields or at work, usually of great simplicity and using local ingredients, among which bread and olive oil will figure, plus wine.
It is noteworthy that the Spanish version was exported, notably to Mexico and the Philippines. In the Philippines a meal called merienda cena is a late meal, heavier than the usual merienda, which counts as a full meal (what we would call supper).
merguez
a sausage of N. Africa, especially Tunisia and Algeria, which is made from beef to comply with Islamic dietary law. They are heavily spiced with HARISSA, which gives them their characteristic hot flavour and red colour. They are eaten grilled and are often one of the ingredients of or accompaniments to COUSCOUS. Merguez have been adopted by the French, who eat them as a snack or with couscous.
meringue
an airy, crisp confection of beaten egg white and sugar. The word probably entered French from German, as did many other French words ending in -ingue. It first appeared in print in Massialot (1691), although earlier recipes for the same thing but without the name had been published. The name travelled to England almost at once and first appeared in print there in 1706. Legends to the effect that the origin of the name is connected with the activities of a Swiss chef in the 1720s may be disregarded. The same applies to the more pleasing notion advanced by Thudichum (1895) that the name came from the Merovingian kings of France, whose dynasty began in AD 481.
It seems to have been only in the 16th century that European cooks discovered that beating egg whites, e.g. with a whisk of birch twigs (in the absence of any better implement), produced an attractive foam. At first the technique was used to make a simple, uncooked dish called SNOW, made from egg white and cream. However, cooking such a foam would not have resulted in meringue, for any fat in the mixture, as represented by the cream, prevents the egg whites from taking on the proper texture. (This is why when meringue is made, the fatty yolks have to be carefully separated.) Even if the cream had been omitted, there would have been technical problems. The presence of any particle of sugar larger than a tiny speck causes absorption of moisture and the problem known as ‘weeping’, drops of sticky syrup. The sugar has to be ground very fine and added gradually. Furthermore, the light texture of meringue makes it such an efficient heat insulator that anything more than the thinnest layer of meringue must be cooked very slowly—more dried than baked—or the centre remains raw and collapses in a gummy mass. Nevertheless, snow was a beginning.
When true meringue made its appearance in the 17th century, it still lacked its name and was often called ‘sugar puff’. Sometimes these were flavoured with caraway seeds. Such practices have continued and multiplied. The addition of some other ingredients or flavourings to meringue can create an almost infinite number of variations. One modern example is japonais, where ground almond is added to the egg white; ground hazelnuts or walnuts can also be used. If this meringue is made into larger disks, they can be layered with buttercream or some other filling to create the cake called dacquoise, named for the SW French town of Dax—were it oblong, it would be a gâteau marjolaine.
Simple meringue is called Swiss. The Italian variety is made by adding the sugar as a boiling syrup. This is used as an ingredient for icings, buttercreams and so on. The trick for achieving a crisp outside and a melting, if not gooey (the polite say marshmallow), interior is to add cornstarch, lemon juice or vinegar after the sugar. This is the secret of pavlova.
Small meringues are easier to make than big ones because of the problem of making heat reach the centre. Very small ones are termed meringuettes or croquignoles in French, and are used as a kind of PETIT FOUR. Modern Dutch schuimpjes are similar, but variously coloured. Medium-sized meringues were found suitable for splitting and filling with flavoured cream; and a layer of meringue continues in use as a topping for various sweet items, e.g. the many sorts of American meringue pie.
The problem of large meringues was solved in the 18th century with the invention of the VACHERIN, a large meringue case made to contain fruit and cream, or some other sweet mixture. In this connection see PAVLOVA; and, for an even more ingenious use of meringue, see BAKED ALASKA.
mesquite
Prosopis juliflora and related species, American plants which are well known for their use as a fuel for barbecues (to which it imparts an attractive aroma), but also providing food from its pods. These may be ground into a meal (flour) which can then be used to make a beverage, or used as a kind of PINOLE, or as material for bread-making. It is exceptionally nutritious.
Medsger (1972), writing about P. glandulosa, remarks that it is often called honey pod because of the sweetness of the pulp surrounding the seeds. Also, the flowers provide nectar for bees, and this makes a delicious honey. The mature pods may be 15 cm (6″) long. When the pods are still green they may be gathered and cooked whole.
metabolism
the total activity of a living creature, including respiration, the uptake of energy from food, and the expenditure of that energy in the processes of life. The speed at which this happens is known as metabolic rate; basal metabolic rate is measured when the organism is at rest, and thus shows how efficiently it uses energy.
The study of metabolism has fascinated researchers for centuries. In the 1580s the Italian physician Santorio (or Sanctorius) began a 30-year experiment in which he tried to measure all the inputs and outputs of his own metabolism. He had a chair, bed, and table placed on a platform suspended from a large but accurate balance, and kept scrupulous records of his weight. More significant findings had to wait till the mid-19th century, when chemistry was far enough advanced to tackle the problem properly. The German researcher Jacob Moleschott (see Jane O’Hara-May, 1984) measured the daily intake of protein, carbohydrates, salts, and water by a man of average size and activity, and weighed and analysed body wastes. From these findings he drew up a balance sheet of the metabolism of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; this was influential well into the 20th century, when modern biochemists were able to provide more accurate and detailed figures.
Metabolic rate varies considerably from person to person; a matter of concern in the anti-fat culture of the West. A person with a low rate needs less food than someone with a high one in order to remain at the same weight. Many people with a high rate can actually eat more than they need and still not gain weight; their metabolism speeds up to burn off the extra energy. While they cram themselves with food and remain as slim as ever, plump people with a slow metabolism can only watch in envy. Nicotine increases metabolic rate, which partly explains why more and more young women are taking up smoking despite its well-known harmful effects. Amphetamines also speed up metabolism and, despite laws curbing the use of these risky drugs, are widely prescribed as ‘slimming pills’.
Ralph Hancock
metal utensils
have both physical and chemical effects on foods. These relate mainly to the preparation and enjoyment of food; but small amounts of metals can also be transferred from utensils into the food itself. All metals except gold and the platinum group corrode in air to form a layer of oxide on the surface, which is sometimes rubbed off into food. Neither pure metals nor their oxides dissolve in pure water, but acidic foodstuffs can react with them to form compounds, some of which are extremely poisonous.
Small amounts of some metals are required in the diet (see MINERALS). However, excessive amounts of these can be seriously harmful.
ALUMINIUM
This metal (often spelled aluminum) is a light white metal. It is a good conductor of heat, though not as good as copper. Aluminium pans should be fairly thick to allow the heat to travel from the centre to the outer rim; cheap, thin pans burn food easily. Modern aluminium pans have a non-stick interior coating of Teflon or some tougher composite material. Formerly they were made of bare metal, and it was assumed that any aluminium compounds accidentally formed in cooking were harmless. Although these substances came under suspicion of involvement in Alzheimer’s disease, this idea is no longer current (see, for example, McGee, 1990). It is, however, best not to cook acidic foods such as fruit in a bare aluminium pan, as this will form substantial amounts of aluminium salts.
Pure aluminium metal was not made in useful amounts until 1845, and was at first extremely expensive. At dinners given by Napoleon III the most honoured guests had aluminium cutlery; the others got gold or silver.
Nowadays, thick-walled pans made of specially hardened aluminium (Cafalon) have become the utensils of choice in many kitchens.
BRASS
An alloy of copper and zinc. It is seldom used in western cooking vessels but sometimes seen further east, for example in the ibrik used for making Turkish coffee (some of these are tinned on the inside). It conducts heat well, but less well than copper.
BRONZE
A hard alloy of copper and tin, occasionally used for cutlery. As with other copper alloys, there is a risk of poisoning if it becomes tarnished.
COPPER
A heavy metal which conducts heat extremely well, making it ideal for cooking vessels. It is covered by a layer of brownish oxide—pure copper is salmon pink, but the colour of a freshly cut surface darkens in minutes. All copper compounds are poisonous; some of them, though not the oxide, dissolve in water and so are particularly dangerous. Most copper pans are coated inside with tin, and the coating should be renewed as soon as it begins to wear off. Untinned copper is traditionally used in ‘preserving pans’ for making jam, which should be well scoured before use. There have been cases of poisoning from unlined copper vessels, especially when vinegar or other liquids containing acetic acid have been allowed to stand in them, forming copper acetate.
Copper is toxic to bacteria. A copper water jug actually disinfects the water in it to some extent. Naturally it must be kept scrupulously clean.
It is traditional to beat egg whites in a copper bowl. Experiments conducted at Stanford University by Harold McGee, Sharon Long, and Winslow Briggs have shown that a copper bowl does produce a lighter, stiffer foam than a glass one—though the foam begins to form more quickly in a glass bowl (reported in Nature, 308/596, 1984). They attribute the effect to interaction between copper and conalbumin, a protein in egg white.
GOLD
This soft, extremely heavy metal is always alloyed with varying amounts of silver and copper. Pure or not, it is not corroded at all either by air or any of the substances in food. The only danger from gold cutlery comes from dropping it on your foot.
For the use of gold leaf as a food decoration, see GOLD AND SILVER LEAF.
IRON
Cast iron is a hard, brittle metal containing large amounts of carbon. (Wrought iron is almost pure and quite soft; it is no longer manufactured, and any modern implement that appears to be made of it is actually of mild steel.) Cast iron is a good conductor of heat, so that thick iron pans cook evenly. Rust, iron oxide, is harmless but tastes unpleasant. Iron frying pans become coated with an impervious layer of oxidized fats which have become linked to one another in a polymerized, plastic-like solid. So they are not a problem in this respect. And iron casseroles are enamelled, so they should also be problem-free.
LEAD
A soft, heavy metal with a low melting point. It quickly forms a thick layer of white oxide, powdery and easily detached. All lead compounds are highly poisonous. Lead is a cumulative poison: the body mistakes it for calcium and uses it to make bone, so that large amounts build up. Poisoning causes colic and damage to the nervous system, as well as learning difficulties in children. The ancient Romans suffered severely from it, since their drinking water was carried in lead-lined aqueducts and stored in lead tanks; they had lead cooking vessels; and they ate defrutum, a sweetener made by boiling down figs in a lead pan, so that the fruit acids leached lead into the mixture. In the 1st century AD the Greek physician Aretaeus described the symptoms, and the Roman architect Vitruvius correctly attributed them to lead in water. Edward Gibbon suggested that chronic lead poisoning was (along with Christianity) one of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Lead has continued to be a problem, especially in old houses with lead pipes; it is wise to run the taps for several minutes first thing each morning to drain away the water polluted by standing overnight. Early food cans were sealed with thick seams of lead solder, which caused slight poisoning when they contained acidic foodstuffs. See also ‘Pewter’, below.
Herefordshire cider, traditionally made in lead-lined presses, was identified in the 18th century as a cause of colic. Even more dangerous was sweet German wine faked by storing cheap, sour wine in lead vessels, forming intensely sweet ‘sugar of lead’, lead acetate. A partial cure was provided by the fashionable practice of ‘taking the waters’ at a spa, which involved floating in a bath for several hours a day. The effectively weightless conditions caused loss of calcium from bones, taking some of the lead with it. As long as enough new calcium (but no more lead) was provided in the diet, the poison would gradually clear from the body.
PEWTER
A soft alloy of variable composition, but always with a very low melting point—a pewter dish placed on an electric cooker ring will melt. Old pewter was composed mainly of lead and tin and, especially when used for acidic food and drink, deposited dangerous amounts of lead. Modern pewter is almost entirely tin with a little antimony to harden it, and is safe enough.
SILVER
An excellent conductor of heat; it is easy to burn your fingers when stirring a pan with a solid silver spoon. The ‘silver’ skillets used in expensive restaurants to prepare flambé dishes at the table are usually silver-plated copper; the coating lasts better than the usual tin.
The metal is quickly corroded by sulphur compounds in vegetables and egg yolks, forming a black tarnish of silver sulphide. This, like all silver compounds, is moderately poisonous. Red wine drunk from a silver goblet would have an unpleasant metallic taste; so the inside of such a goblet is gilded.
Silver, like copper, is toxic to bacteria, and a silver water jug purifies its contents.
For the use of silver leaf as a food decoration, see GOLD AND SILVER LEAF.
STEEL AND STAINLESS STEEL
Ordinary steel consists of iron (see above) with a little carbon added to harden it. ‘Mild’ steel is fairly soft, and is used in sheet form for baking trays and other utensils. ‘High carbon’ steel is harder and is used for good-quality cook’s knives.
Steel is much more prone to rust than either cast or wrought iron and, except in knife blades, is always given a protective coating of tin, zinc, or enamel. When bare steel comes into contact with the complex chemicals in foodstuffs unexpected things can happen, often caused by CHELATION of iron atoms. The red anthocyanin pigments in fruits and red cabbage turn dark blue or grey, and off flavours may form. If a fruit pie is baked in a chipped enamelled steel dish, the filling will discolour around the chip.
Ordinary steel is a fairly good conductor of heat, and enamelled steel pans will cook evenly if the base is thick. Stainless steel, on the other hand, conducts heat poorly. High-quality stainless saucepans have a base made of a thick sheet of copper encased in thin steel, to ensure good heat transfer.
Stainless steel is an alloy of iron with 8% to 25% chromium and usually some nickel. It does not rust, but most kinds discolour quite easily. Only the ‘18–8’ alloy is genuinely stainless; this is used for most utensils but is too soft for knife blades. If any kind of stainless steel is severely overheated it will discolour irreversibly.
TIN
A soft metal with a low melting point, mainly used as a coating on steel to prevent it from rusting, and inside copper pans. The metal wears away rapidly, so that foods prepared in tinned vessels contain appreciable quantities of pure tin and tin oxide. These, and tin compounds formed by reactions with foodstuffs, are not poisonous—though some organic tin compounds are deadly. Tin bleaches some plant pigments, and used to have unexpected effects on tinned fruit. Modern cans are lacquered inside. The milk pails used for hand-milking are tinned, rather than galvanized (see ‘Zinc’ below) like ordinary buckets. So, usually, are the metal parts of old-fashioned food mills and graters.
See also ‘Pewter’, above.
ZINC
Zinc, a soft metal which corrodes to form a rough layer of grey oxide, can be used to galvanize (i.e. coat) iron or steel to prevent it from rusting. However, care is needed in using galvanized utensils for food. Although zinc is an essential mineral, an overdose of it (or indeed of any metal, including tin) can be seriously harmful.
Ralph Hancock
Mexico
is a big country, eight times the size of Great Britain, for example. It stretches from the arid borderlands with the United States in the north to the tropical jungles of the Yucatan in the south, from the humid coastlines on the Gulf of Mexico in the east to the drier Pacific coast on the west. The high central plateau, where much of the population lives at an elevation of 1800 m (6,000′) or more, is separated from the coasts by massive mountain ranges, passable only in a few places. Many parts of the country are still largely Indian with ways of life and culinary customs little changed by the Spanish Conquest; Mexico City, by contrast, is the largest city in the world, subject to the same international influences as any large metropolis. Does it then make sense to speak of Mexican food?
The answer is yes, and one way to see why is to consider the scene just after daybreak in the towns and villages across the Republic. Along the nearly empty streets, women walk slowly but purposefully, brightly coloured plastic buckets hefted on their shoulders. They are on their way to or from the mill, about the business of getting their MAIZE ground for the daily bread (TORTILLAS). Each night, they boil dried maize with water and lime, leaving it to soak overnight. In the morning, they drain it and rub the skins off the grains, before placing it in a bucket to take it off to the mill. There it is ground into a coarse wet flour (masa, or nixtamal). Once home again, they will shape it by hand or by hand press into flat cakes (tortillas), some 18 cm (7″) in diameter and 2 mm (0.08″) thick. These tortillas are cooked in seconds on a griddle (comal) and, even in the poorest families, carefully wrapped in a hand-embroidered napkin to keep them hot. The making of tortillas (as well as the roasting of onions, garlic, tomatoes, and chillies prior to their incorporation in sauces) is so central to Mexican cooking that stoves come ready equipped with griddles, in the same way that stoves in Europe and the United States come equipped with grills.
The plastic buckets and the mills appeared in the second half of the 20th century. So too did small neighbourhood tortilla factories for families that did not wish to make their own (though the consensus is that hand-made tortillas are cleaner and softer than those from the factories). Before that the grain was laboriously ground by hand on a grinding stone (metate). But these recent innovations are minor variants on a procedure that goes back centuries before the Spanish conquistadores first set foot in the country in 1519. It was the peoples of Mexico and its southern neighbour Guatemala who domesticated maize. How they did so is the subject of much scholarly debate but the achievement produced the world’s third most important crop (following wheat and rice), a crop so thoroughly domesticated that it cannot reproduce without human intervention. It was they, too, who happened on the technique of soaking and boiling with wood ash or lime (NIXTAMALIZATION) which archaeological evidence suggests was already in place by 1500–1200 BC. This innovation, which unlike the plant itself was never transferred to the Old World, simultaneously makes it possible to remove the skin of the grain, allows the grain to be ground to a flour that produces a flexible bread, and renders the protein in the grain more accessible.
Maize remains the foundation of Mexican cuisine, eaten in all areas and by all classes (though the poorer the class, the heavier the consumption). It may be eaten in the form of tortillas, either to accompany other dishes, or stuffed with some combination of beans, meats, vegetables, and cheese. It may be eaten in the form of TAMALES, the dough stuffed with savoury or sweet mixtures and steamed in maize or banana leaves. It may be shaped into small cakes of myriad shapes and names, stuffed or topped with a variety of savoury mixtures. Or it may be taken as a thick drink, a kind of gruel, ATOLE, made by mixing the dough with water and flavourings, a favourite for breakfast and supper.
As well as maize, the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of Mexico had a rich variety of vegetable ingredients, still used today. Of particular importance were BEANS and chillies (CAPSICUMS). The vegetable protein of the beans complemented that of the maize, the chillies provided vitamins and seasoning. Aside from these, there were TOMATOES, AVOCADOS, SQUASHES, a rich array of tropical and subtropical fruits, and some exotics which we still value greatly, VANILLA, one of the few edible orchids, and CHOCOLATE. The lakes and rivers and coastline provided fish and shellfish, as well as edible algae. There were TURKEYS, GUINEA PIGS, and a varied range of game. The detailed recording of the foods of pre-Hispanic C. America by the early conquistadores, and, even more important, by the Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún in his General History of the Things of New Spain compiled in the mid-16th century, make it clear that the diet of the country was satisfying and varied. Again, most of the ingredients that supplemented the staple, maize, and the ways of preparing them remain central to Mexican cuisine; a main meal is incomplete without a serving of beans, usually simply boiled and served in their broth, and an enormous variety of chillies are cultivated to be chopped and added fresh to foods, or pickled in vinegar, or dried prior to being soaked and ground to flavour and thicken sauces.
With the arrival of the conquistadores in the 16th century, a whole range of new ingredients became available without causing the abandonment of older foods. The Spaniards brought with them wheat for bread, rice, almonds, sesame, sugar, spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg, raisins, capers, and olives. Many of these ingredients, and the methods of preparing them, have a distinctly medieval, Arab touch, reminding us that the Moors were finally expelled from Spain in the same year that Columbus discovered America. Besides this, Spanish cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats introduced European meats and fats, milk, butter, and cheese to the Mexican diet. To this day, Mexican food is a mestizo mixture of pre-Hispanic and Spanish, with the preponderance tipping to the Spanish in the higher social classes.
The major Mexican meal is taken between two and four, though this is somewhat under threat in large cities where distances make midday travel home impossible. In its full form, it consists of five courses: a soup (often of vegetable or noodles); a so-called dry soup (perhaps best understood as the equivalent of the Italian pasta course) of rice or noodles; a meat or fish dish accompanied by tortillas; beans; and a fruit or dessert with coffee. This is preceded by an early breakfast of coffee, milk, or atole with fruit and pastry and perhaps a later breakfast mid-morning of eggs, bacon, tomato and chilli sauces, and tortillas. The evening meal, except for a special occasion when it can be quite elaborate, is a simple matter of a pastry, a cup of chocolate, fruit, or perhaps some leftovers. The excellent rolls and sweet breads are usually attributed to the strong French influence, both cultural and political, of the second half of the 19th century.
The main courses that anchor the meal can be divided into a variety of types in addition to the simple grills and roasts that are as popular in Mexico as anywhere else. There are the MOLES, regarded as the national dish, and essential on festive occasions. A mixture of chillies, nuts, seeds, garlic, and spices is ground on the stone metate (or less satisfactorily if more expeditiously in the blender that almost every Mexican household possesses) and fried in hot fat (lard or cooking oil), water is added, and the whole simmered to make a thick aromatic sauce. (Sometimes a small amount of bitter chocolate is included, leading to the common misconception that Mexicans cook meat in chocolate sauce.) Pre-cooked meat or poultry is then added to the sauce. Then there are the stews of Hispanic origin, the tingas and almendradas for example, made by the more familar technique of sautéeing onion and garlic and then simmering the meat in the sauce. Also enormously popular are a range of dishes made with mildly hot chilli peppers stuffed with meat or fish or beans, dipped in an egg batter, and fried.
Mexico is not the home of elaborate vegetable dishes, although the consumption of vegetables is enormous. They are eaten as soups, sliced raw and stirred into soups (radishes and avocados, for example), made into fresh sauces that are on the table for every meal, in stews, or piled on top of street food. Sweets in Mexico are just that, sweet. The classic ones are universally attributed to the nuns who sold them to raise money for their convents. Like certain other dishes, they have a medieval, Mediterranean air: glossy globes of crystallized fruit, thick pastes of quince or guava, milk boiled down to the consistency of toffee, things to be nibbled, crossing the N. European boundary between candy and dessert.
Mexico has an extraordinary range of drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. Apart from the atoles, there are the licuados, liquefied fruits and vegetables often with the addition of milk or a raw egg, that can be bought for a quick breakfast or pick-me-up on any street corner in a Mexican town. There are the aguas frescas, mildly sweet infusions of fruit or vegetables in water, sharpened with a little lime juice and quaffed in quantities with meals; tuna (cactus fruit), tamarind, cucumber, pineapple, melon, and another of those Arab legacies, horchata, an infusion of ground rice and almond. There are a range of bottled fizzy fruit drinks and hot fruit punches for Christmas as well as coffee, chocolate, and herbal teas galore. Pulque is the most famous mildly alcoholic drink, made from the sap of the agave plant which ferments readily without the addition of yeast, and sold in pulquerias, a Mexican male preserve with a folklore all their own. These, though, are now vanishing as beer, first introduced by German immigrants in the 19th century, gains in popularity. Tequila, made from the heart of a certain kind of agave, is now heavily promoted and perhaps the best-known alcoholic drink outside the country. It was the Spanish who introduced distilled liquors of this kind, and tequila is in fact just one special kind of mezcal, the generic name for agave liquors, and they in turn are just one of the series of liquors and liqueurs from cane sugar, pineapple, and other less well-known sources.
No account of Mexican food would be complete without mentioning its street food, candied sweet potatoes, roast ears of corn with chilli and lime juice, plastic cups of gelatin and flan, bags of green chickpeas cooked in the pod, boiled peanuts, huge sheets of chicharron (fried pork rind, see CRACKLING) with hot pepper sauce, plastic bags stuffed with cut watermelon, cantaloupe, JICAMA, and coconut, glass jars of aguas frescas in pale green and white and crimson, but particularly the tacos (rolled, stuffed TORTILLAS), TAMALES, and tortas (stuffed bread rolls). These latter three can be prepared at home, but most often picked up from stands under the arcades in town squares or at the crossings of country roads. They can be filled with vegetables or cooked meats or any of the specially prepared meats that are usually also found in the market place such as barbacoa from the centre of the country (lamb wrapped in aromatic leaves and steamed) or carnitas (chunks of pork cooked in their own fat) or pibil from the Yucatan (pork wrapped in aromatic leaves and cooked in an underground oven).
These are the shared foods of Mexico. But the geographic diversity and wide spread of incomes means that within these general categories, foods are sharply distinguished both regionally and with respect to class. Veracruz on the Gulf Coast is famous for black beans and fish, the Yucatan peninsula for its seasonings of achiote and sour orange, Puebla and Oaxaca for their moles, Sinaloa for charcoal-grilled chicken, the northern states for their flour tortillas, and on and on. So too, in a country where religious (syncretic Catholic/Indian in many instances) and national holidays are celebrated with gusto, where food distribution remains sufficiently uneven that it does not swamp out the seasons, where freezers are still rarities, food varies with the seasons and with the festivals.
Mexicans are proud of their culinary heritage which they regard as one of the richest in the world. From the publication of El cocinero mexicano in 1831 (revised as Nuevo cocinero mexicano en forma de diccionario in 1872), there have been a series of recipe books, histories of food, celebrated traditional restaurants, and culinary organizations in the country. Although ‘international’ food (hot dogs, pizza, rotisserie chicken, and imported popcorn) is consumed, the tradition of Mexican cooking remains not simply alive and well, but dominant.
See also AZTEC FOOD; MAYA FOOD.
Rachel Laudan
mezze
(sometimes spelled meze) an interesting word which came originally from the Persian maza, meaning ‘taste, relish’. One of the few authors who has shown awareness of this Persian origin is Ayla Algar (1991):
I have traced the possible origin of meze to ancient Persia, where wine was the center of an emotional and esthetic experience that also included other forms of enjoyment, notably food and music. The original meze of Persia appear to have been tart fruits, such as pomegranates, quinces, and citrons, designed to alleviate the bitter taste left by unripe wine. Later nuts and small pieces of roasted meat were added to the spread of the wine drinker.
The mezze tradition extends westwards from Turkey into the Balkans, including Greece and southwards to the Lebanon and Egypt, and through N. Africa to Morocco; but in other Muslim countries the prohibition of alcohol has had sufficient force to prevent the mezze tradition from taking root (or, in the case of Iran, continuing in modern times).
Even in those Muslim countries where mezze survive or flourish, it is noticeable that they tend to be part of the structure of a main meal. In Greece and the Balkans, on the other hand, their function more closely resembles that of TAPAS in Spain, i.e. they are nibbles to be taken while drinking, or more particularly gossiping.
It has been well said that ‘no Greek drinks without eating’, and mezze are certainly important in Greece as food to be eaten with alcohol. Indeed, it used to be the case that mezze were served free with the ouzo.
Typical mezze found all over Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and N. Africa include a range of simple snacks such as olives or cubes of cheese, more complicated dips such as TARAMOSALATA, tsatsiki (cucumber and yoghurt), baba ghanoush (aubergine purée), hummus, and more substantial salads and snacks of TABBOULEH, FALAFEL, DOLMA, and KEBAB.
It is generally acknowledged that Lebanese mezze are second to none, not only in variety and flavour but also in appearance. Anissa Helou (1994) has written:
The colours on the table were quite wonderful. Many of the dishes were served in Lebanese slipware bowls decorated with lovely brown and cream glazes. Inside them the food ranged from delicate shades of beige, a light ivory hommus (chick pea purée) to a raw silk like baba ghannooge (aubergine purée), each decorated with a sprinkling of red paprika interspersed with fresh green mint leaves. There were bright colours too, purple pickles, a glossy green tabbooleh (parsley salad) dappled with tiny red tomato cubes and light brown burghul grains and pink habrah nayeh (pounded raw meat). Then there were the savoury pastries, mini black thyme breads, light brown meat pizzas dotted with roasted pine nuts, dainty golden triangles and so many other colourful dishes.
micro-organisms
a general term for single-celled living creatures. These include BACTERIA, YEASTS, and MOULDS, which are described under those headings.
Another group is the protozoans, single-celled animals. These include amoebae, some of which cause a severe form of dysentery; and marine dinophytes, which can suddenly multiply in enormous numbers to produce the ‘red tides’ that make shellfish poisonous. Algae include both single-celled and multicellular types, such as SEAWEEDS. Only one group of single-celled algae, Chlorella, has anything to do with food: it has been suggested that this should be grown in space stations to renew the oxygen in the air and to provide a raw material that could be processed into human food. Viruses are not usually classed as micro-organisms, for they are not truly alive and can only operate by hijacking living cells. They are relevant to food only insofar as they cause diseases in plants and animals.
Micro-organisms play varied and important roles in food, from useful fermentations to spoilage and FOOD POISONING.
Raw foodstuffs usually contain several kinds of micro-organism. These may feed on different substances and so be able to coexist, or they may compete for the same substance. An example of the first type is CAMEMBERT cheese, inside which lactic acid-producing bacteria live on lactose (milk sugar), while on the surface a mould digests protein, in the process softening the texture of the whole cheese. Examples of the second type are the ‘alcoholic yoghurts’ such as KEFIR, in which lactic bacteria and yeasts compete for sugar. In this case the two manage to grow side by side for long enough to achieve the finished product. More often, one organism will outgrow and overwhelm the other.
Some micro-organisms succeed by creating conditions in which their rivals cannot live. Again, the lactic bacteria are an example, making their surroundings so acidic that no other organisms can function; this is how they preserve foods. In fact these bacteria are usually themselves of several species able to tolerate different levels of acidity: low-acid types begin the fermentation and continue until they poison themselves with their own waste products; then more acid-tolerant species take over.
Micro-organisms, like any living things, grow best in certain conditions. Some can tolerate only a small amount of salt or sugar, while others thrive in quite salty or sugary foods. Some grow only where there is air, others where there is none—these are known as ‘aerobic’ and ‘anaerobic’ organisms. A few can switch modes to suit conditions: brewer’s yeast, in the airless conditions of a brewing vat, produces mainly alcohol and a little carbon dioxide; while in airy conditions, as in bread dough, it produces a lot of carbon dioxide and a little alcohol. Most organisms grow best in moderate warmth, but there are many exceptions. Some moulds can grow in a deep freeze. Some bacteria can live at temperatures near boiling point, and some can form spores that survive prolonged boiling and grow into new bacteria when the temperature falls (see BOTULISM).
When a micro-organism is stopped from growing by being outnumbered, or by being frozen, or by excessive sugar, salt, or acid, it usually remains alive and will restart growth if conditions change. Thus the moulds which grow on top of jam will, if they infect a carelessly cleaned pot, be unable to grow in the strong sugar solution of the jam. But if the jam exudes a little moisture, which is a less concentrated solution, they will start growing in the little pool of liquid on top of the jam. Similarly, if dried foods become damp, organisms of several kinds will start growing.
Traditional methods of food PRESERVATION often work by creating conditions in which desirable organisms can grow while others give up. Thus salt added to shredded cabbage favours the salt-tolerant lactic bacteria which turn the vegetable to SAUERKRAUT. In the making of YOGHURT the milk is kept at a temperature slightly above blood heat, the preferred conditions of the bacteria that bring about the fermentation. Such methods are generally too hit-or-miss for the modern food industry, where the usual method is to kill all micro-organisms—or most of them, as in pasteurization (see MILK)—and introduce a pure culture of the desired organism.
Ralph Hancock
microwave cooking
a technique in which electromagnetic radiation is used to heat food. All radiation is a form of energy, and energy can be converted from one form to another. In this case the radiation absorbed by the food is transformed into heat. Microwaves are similar to radio waves but of higher frequency: in a domestic microwave oven this is 2,450 megahertz (MHz, millions of cycles a second), compared to around 100 megahertz for VHF radio. Radar also uses microwaves, so that in theory it would be possible to cook food by putting it at the focus of a radar dish.
Microwave cooking is quick, because the radiation penetrates the food more readily than the ‘heat radiation’ given off by the heating element in a conventional oven. (Heat is propagated by infrared radiation, similar in nature to microwaves but of much lower frequency.) It is also efficient, because radiation of a frequency around 2.5 GHz is strongly absorbed by the large organic molecules in food. This is apparent from the fact that the container in which the food is placed is hardly warmed at all, because its molecules are much smaller—they would need a higher frequency to be heated effectively.
Thanks to the efficiency of the process, microwave ovens use much less power than ordinary ones; typically they consume 600 to 800 watts, against 3,000 or more for an electric oven, and only for a fraction of the time needed for cooking by conventional methods.
A common misconception about microwave ovens is that they heat food ‘from the inside’. This is not so: all the radiation is beamed into the food from a waveguide (a type of antenna) in the roof of the oven, and has to penetrate it like any other radiation. When using the oven to thaw a large piece of meat, it is possible to leave the centre frozen if the heating time is too short. Nor is the radiation evenly distributed throughout the cabinet: there are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ spots. Most ovens have either an electrically driven turntable to revolve the food, or rotating ‘stirrers’ to deflect the radiation, so that heating is as even as possible.
A drawback of microwave cooking is that the food is not browned on the outside. This can be overcome to some extent by putting the cooked food briefly under an ordinary grill. Some microwave ovens have been made with a small conventional heating element inside the cabinet, which can be switched on to brown the food.
Some cooks scorn microwave ovens because they do not cook food ‘properly’. But only a diehard traditionalist would deny that they are very useful for thawing frozen foods and reheating dishes made in advance and frozen.
Two spectacular accidents can occur. If food is put inside the oven in a metal dish, even a thin one made of foil, it will produce electrical discharges like a small thunderstorm in the cabinet. It is tempting to make a single cup of tea by using the oven to boil a cup of water and then putting in a teabag. The oven can ‘superheat’ the water above its normal boiling point, without the water actually boiling—there has to be some kind of ‘nucleus’ for the first bubble to form around, such as a speck of solid matter in the water. When the teabag is dropped into the superheated water it provides plenty of nuclei; the water boils suddenly and the teabag explodes with great force.
Ralph Hancock
milk
is the most versatile of all foods. Fresh milk and products made from it (CREAM, BUTTER, BUTTERMILK, WHEY, all kinds of CHEESE, and innumerable soured milk products such as YOGHURT and SOUR CREAM) are widely used in the cuisines of large areas of the world. Milk has long been held in high esteem for its nutritious quality, which even in pre-scientific days was apparent from the fact that it provided complete nourishment for young animals and humans.
The oldest known record of animals being kept in herds and milked is a series of cave paintings in the Libyan Sahara, showing milking and perhaps cheese-making too, and possibly older than 5000 BC. The Sumerians, around 3500 BC, and the Egyptians a few centuries later used milk and have left reliefs and records showing that they prepared curdled milk products.
In contrast, the Chinese have seldom used milk: nor have peoples in a large part of SE Asia nor in any part of America before the Europeans arrived. It was also unknown in some parts of Africa. The inhabitants of these areas are usually unable, not merely disinclined, to take milk once they have grown up. Technically, they suffer from LACTOSE INTOLERANCE, which means they lose the ability to digest the lactose sugar in milk.
Before the techniques of refrigeration and pasteurization were introduced, milk would not stay fresh for long. It went sour, became rancid, or curdled. The whole range of milk products arose as a means of controlling this tendency and even turning it to advantage.
In composition, milk is mostly water. In cow’s milk, the water content is 87% by weight. The next heaviest constituent, at about 5%, is milk sugar, which is almost entirely lactose. Its molecule is split in fermentation or digestion to yield the simple monosaccharide sugars dextrose and galactose. Fat content averages slightly under 4% but varies widely. The fatty substances include carotenoids (yellow pigments from plants which impart a creamy colour), free fatty acids which contribute to flavour, and the fat-soluble VITAMINS A, D, E, and K. Milk also contains useful amounts of the water-soluble vitamins (C and the B group). PROTEINS total about 3.5%, mostly casein, which is what constitutes the solid curd when milk is curdled. Traces of acetaldehyde, acetone, and formaldehyde contribute to the flavour of milk; and very fresh milk contains methyl sulphide, which gives it its ‘cowy’ smell.
Milks from different kinds of animal vary noticeably in composition. Thus human milk is more watery than cow’s milk, has more sugar, less fat, and much less protein. This sort of variation can usually be related to the length of time which the young take to mature. Human babies grow slowly, calves quickly. The average figures for some animal milks are given in the table, in percentages by weight.
But these figures are only averages. The composition of milk from the same kind of animal, indeed even from the same animal, is variable. Changes can be remarked according to the breed (for example Jersey and Guernsey cows give high-fat milk, Holstein low); the animal’s diet, which itself changes with the seasons; the animal’s age; the stage in its lactation period (see BEESTINGS); the time of day at which it is milked; and even the stage reached in one milking (the last milk to emerge has more fat than the first). Flavours vary, too; not only from species to species, as is patent from a comparison of cow, sheep, and goat cheeses, but also according to a particular animal’s health (see STRACCHINO) and diet. Odd flavours can get into milk from strong-tasting foods eaten by the animal, and even from smelly substances in the air it breathes. And all this is before the milk even emerges. Many other factors can cause changes thereafter.
Milk pasteurization and preservation
Virtually all the milk on sale in western countries has been pasteurized to kill most of the bacteria naturally present in it and to make it keep longer. The least rigorous method of pasteurization uses a temperature below boiling point, and also below the critical temperature of 74 °C (165 °F) at which the compactly coiled molecules of the lactoglobulin proteins in the milk are irreversibly opened out, altering the flavour of the milk and giving it a ‘cooked’ taste. The milk may be heated to 63–6 °C (145–50 °F) for 30 minutes or, in a more modern process which, it is claimed, makes less difference to the flavour, to 72 °C (161 °F) for 15 seconds, followed by rapid cooling. HTST (‘high temperature, short time’) pasteurization of milk is done as the milk flows along a narrow pipe through a heat exchanger, so that heating and cooling can be very rapid indeed. ‘Longlife’ or UHT (ultra high temperature) is heated for only 1–2 seconds to as much as 138 °C (280 °F).
Sterilized milk, which may be given a preliminary UHT treatment, is bottled and then heated in the sealed bottles to 110 °C (230 °F) for 20 to 30 minutes. It tastes rather strange, stranger than UHT milk, since the prolonged heating has caused chemical reactions between the proteins and the sugars in the milk.
Raw milk fresh from the cow contains many kinds of ENZYMES, most of which are destroyed by pasteurization. The important enzyme actions which occur in the making of milk products are largely brought about by enzymes from outside sources. However, a few of the enzymes naturally present in milk survive and may do useful work. One of them, amylase, liberates sugar from the starch in flour, an effect useful in baking.
From the moment it leaves the udder, milk is subject to invasion by BACTERIA of many kinds. It is as close to being a perfect food for them as it is for human beings and animals. Some of these bacteria are harmful but others are beneficial, notably the LACTIC ACID-producing bacteria. It is these which have a souring effect on milk and are exploited in making fermented milk products. Although most of these bacteria are present naturally, it is usual in fermentation processes to add a starter culture of the preferred ones to give them a head start. Once these are in the majority they remain dominant and thwart the growth of others.
Physically, milk is a fluid, as all can see. It can be more precisely described as ‘an emulsion, colloidal suspension and solution’. Its structure, in short, is quite complex. The casein (which constitutes most protein) and the fats are clustered separately in tiny micelles (groups of molecules—the closest lay term is ‘globules’) floating independently in water in which the sugar, salts, and other proteins are dispersed. This structure can break down when some chemical substance or physical event disturbs its balance. The casein and fat micelles then agglomerate into a curd, leaving the watery solution as whey.
When milk curdles, the long strands of the casein molecules tangle and link together. The extent to which this happens depends on what has caused the curdling. The fairly mild lactic acid produced in normal souring brings about only a light linkage, resulting in slight thickening of the milk without much separation of curds and whey. Enzymes such as rennin cause much greater linking and contraction of the network of strands, forcing out much of the whey so that there is a clearly visible clotting and separation.
Heating also restructures the proteins, and is a potent weapon in the battle to make milk keep longer than it naturally would. See the box on pasteurization, etc.
Milk may be homogenized to stop the cream from rising to the top. Separation occurs because the fat globules are just too large to remain suspended in the emulsion and, being lighter than water, slowly collect at the top. In homogenization, a process invented in France, the milk is forced through tiny holes which break the fat into smaller globules. Although homogenization is a purely mechanical treatment, it does affect the flavour of the milk, making it blander, and also increases its whiteness. Homogenized milk froths and boils over, and also curdles more readily.
Milk may also be skimmed to remove the cream, lowering the fat content of the remaining milk. This was formerly done by letting the cream rise to the top and then skimming it off. Now it is done in a centrifuge, which whirls the milk around rapidly in a circular vessel. The cream, which is lighter, collects at the centre. A little cream can be removed for ‘partly skimmed milk’; or as much as possible may be extracted.
Evaporated and condensed milk are both made in the same way at the start: by heating milk moderately in a strong vacuum which lowers the boiling point so that most of the water evaporates. The resulting thick liquid is then either given a high temperature treatment to sterilize it, making evaporated milk; or sweetened to preserve it, making condensed milk. In both the flavour is much altered.
Powdered milk is made from skimmed milk. Whole milk is hardly ever made into powder because the fat in it becomes oxidized by exposure to the air and tastes unpleasant. Even skimmed milk suffers from this trouble to some extent. The flavour is altered both by oxidation and by the heat used in the process, which is usually spray-drying: the milk is sprayed into a large drum filled with hot air and the drops dry before they reach the bottom.
Powdered, evaporated, condensed, sterilized, and UHT milks all keep for a long time unrefrigerated, though the liquid ones usually begin to go off once they have been opened. Ordinary pasteurized milk lasts only three days in the refrigerator, or a week or so if held just above freezing. When it does finally succumb to bacteria it becomes very unpleasant. Rather than being soured by lactic acid-producing species, which prefer warmer temperatures and anyway have been almost wiped out by pasteurization, it is attacked by proteolytic (protein-destroying) bacteria which can work at low temperatures. These make the milk alkaline and smelly.
Yet another way of keeping milk has been described by Emerson (1908), in a chapter concerned mainly with myths but in terms which suggest that there is some historical record of what he relates:
When the European first visited India he found that the aborigines had for a beverage a drink which they called dhy, and on investigation it was ascertained to be dried milk. The method of drying it was primitive indeed. The milk of an ass, a mare, or a goat was put into a leather bag or skin and, tightly closed, this was then suspended beneath the belly of a horse. It soon became hard, greatly resembling chalk. When it was wanted for use a piece was broken off and dissolved in water, making a pleasant and invigorating drink. Its taste was slightly acid, but its odour was that of very sour milk. When and by whom this practice was inaugurated is not known; it is only one of the thousands of things that are lost in antiquity.
In cooking with milk the chief problems are with CURDLING of one kind or another. This may be flocculation: separation at relatively low temperatures. At higher temperatures, above 70 °C (158 °F), COAGULATION occurs: this is the change in the proteins brought about by heat.
One of the commonest and most annoying instances of coagulation in milk is the formation of a skin when it is heated. Little pieces of denatured protein rise to the surface and join up into a layer which becomes increasingly coagulated and dehydrated, and thus tougher. It can be averted by stirring the milk; but as soon as stirring stops, the skin begins to form. It is no use trying to stir it back in to recombine it once it has formed: the only result is a mess of little bits of skin. There is no special type of milk which is immune from this problem, although semi-skimmed and skimmed milk suffer from it less. Skin formation can be reduced by heating milk only as hot as is needed—if possible not over 70 °C (158 °F)—and at the last feasible moment. In the catering trade milk may be heated with a jet of superheated steam from an espresso machine, which makes it froth rather than form a skin.
Milk sticks to pans when heated, for the same reason. A thin pan which does not spread the heat can cause fierce coagulation in the centre. The coagulated milk begins to ‘burn’—that is, the proteins and sugar break down—producing brown specks and an undesirable taste. A thick pan, stirring, and moderate heating for as short a time as possible all help to avoid sticking.
Both flocculation and coagulation in milk are irreversible once they have occurred. There are no restorative measures as there are with mayonnaise or other emulsions.
Since milk and its products are among our most nutritious and delicious foods, it would be wrong to end this entry on a note of irreversible disaster. Rather should one remind oneself that milk is a great drink; it has built up its own ‘culture’ in many parts of the world—for instance, MILK BARS, the milk shakes of N. America, and the so far indestructible figure of the British milkman (milko in Australia)—and all this without taking into account the fabulously rich gallery of milk products.
The universal consumption of fresh or processed milk as a drink on its own is very much a product of modern refrigeration, other preservation strategies, and the distribution of powdered milk as country-to-country food aid. It might be among the most important dietary changes of the 20th century, with concomitant effects on agricultural production and human health.